Plain Language Summary: How to Visually Measure Our Connection with Nature?

By Xuanyi Wang and Shulin Chen.

Read the full paper here.

The dominance of urban life has been costing us an intimate relationship with nature. Worldwide people spend more than 90% of their daily lives indoors. The growing gap between humans and nature has already driven an alarming ecological decline as well as contributed to a multitude of physical, mental, and emotional illnesses. Amidst the complex dynamic between humans and nature, our connection to the natural environment is pivotal in promoting nature contact and fostering pro-environmental behavior. We need to rebuild this connection. However, before embarking on this endeavor, an essential question arises: How can we measure our personal or even our community’s connection with nature? Hence, developing a well-designed and thoroughly validated measurement tool is paramount. One such tool is the Extended version of the Inclusion of Nature in Self scale (EINS), which offers several distinct advantages. It captures the essence of our connection with nature, employs easily understood graphical spatial metaphors, and adopts a concise item structure. Nevertheless, the scale’s performance, particularly in diverse cultural contexts, remains a subject of uncertainty.

Recognizing this research gap, we translated the EINS scale into Chinese (EINS-C) and conducted a comprehensive examination of its feasibility among a sample of Chinese adults. The findings yielded promising results, indicating that the scale proved to be highly useful. It exhibited a consistent and stable structure, featured easily comprehensible items, and demonstrated high levels of reliability and validity. Notably, this visually oriented scale consisted of merely four items, making it a high-quality and user-friendly tool for assessing and monitoring the relationship between humans and nature. The validation of the scale holds value not only for the Chinese-speaking community, which comprises over 1.4 billion individuals worldwide, accounting for approximately 16 percent of the global population, but also for other countries, particularly developing nations that are also experiencing urbanization.